ICT [2005/04/14]--Disney's Carib Indian cannibals deserve boycott
An editorial in Indian Country Today (see the link above) rightly encourages a boycott of Disney over its slander against the Caribs. While claiming that the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, is simply "fiction, not history" and "entertainment", Disney has obviously chosen to reinforce a particular kind of fiction, that is, a historical fiction of the kind perpetrated by European invaders and slave traders of the colonial Caribbean. This is tantamount to saying that because the Nazis constructed a fictional view of Jews as a plague of rats in 1930s Germany, as shown in Nazi propaganda films, we are free to reproduce this fiction today arguing, "it's just fiction". To the extent that some would inevitably enjoy seeing a people portrayed as rats, one would then be able to argue that it is also "entertainment". Disney's fiction is not pure, original, fiction--it is a mirror of the past. Given the sense of shame that many modern day Carib descendants have been made to feel as a result of centuries of well worn allegations of the "savagery" of their ancestors, Disney is playing its little part in continuing ethnocide.
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